IBS Application for Jeremiah 4:27

“For thus says the Lord, ‘The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end’.”

This is perhaps the oddest choice for and IBS I’ve ever made. I haven’t had anything speak to me quite as much as this has within the past week, though. The Lord is just telling me about His goodness in a new way, one which I have seen before.

Before I get into that however, some context. This is, as many of us already know, a piece of one of the prophecies of judgement that God had Jeremiah preach against Judah. This was all at a time when Judah had completely turned their backs on God and had started worshipping the gods of the pagans, engaging in all manners of filthy unrighteousness. In order to discipline His people, the Lord foretold of the destruction He would bring upon them using the Babylonians in an attempt to get them to feel the fear of the Lord again and turn back to Him.

What is interesting about all of this is that God speaks about Judah’s destruction with such finality that it sounds as though He is done with them entirely should they choose not to repent. However, He also speaks from the foreknowledge that they would not turn back to Him in repentance, so it may appear at first that He is not leaving them much room for hope here outside of immediate repentance. That is, until we come to this verse.

Here, the Lord outright declares that He will destroy Judah. “The whole land shall be a desolation,” He says. But He also makes a promise: “Yet I will not make a full end.”

God declares destruction upon the people whom have abandoned their allegiance to Him, and also promises to not entirely destroy them. From history we know this to be true: the Babylonians did not destroy all the people of Judah, but rather led them into captivity for a time. God did keep His promises here. But why spare so many when it may have just been easier to use a few select people to restore Judah to righteousness? The simple answer is that God still loves these people despite their treachery. The longer answer is that their captivity to the Babylonians by which they were spared death is an occasion of what I have been led to identify as God’s “severe mercy” at work.

Why didn’t God destroy these rebellious people? Because He desires to show them mercy. Captivity under the pagan Babylonians was without a doubt a big wake-up call for every member of Judah to realize their sin and turn back to God. If God had simply made a “full end” of them, they would not have been able to ever seek forgiveness of Him again, and Israel/Judah would have been cut off from Him forever. It was by this incomplete destruction and the leading of Judah into captivity that God disciplined His people. Why is this important to us today? It may help to have an anecdote to explain why.

A few years ago, I was in a position of disobedience towards the Lord that I did not realize was disobedience, primarily because I thought that I was fulfilling one of the Lord’s commandments. This commandment was to honor one’s earthly father and mother, in the sense that one is to support them as they grow to need it with age or due to failing health. The parent in question was my mother, and she had become sick enough to need support. Her illness was hard on both of us. I tried to tough it out and work through it; however, “working” through it was precisely my problem. I thought that I was being righteous by doing everything in my own strength, but by in doing this, I was acting apart from the Lord. He did not grant me much grace in that season of my life because I was acting in disobedience. The relationship I had with my mother had started to become mutually harmful in many ways as a result. It all began to build up a toxic level of anger towards each other that culminated in what became the worst day of my life, which I will not say more about here.

Before anyone assumes the worst, God has since restored the relationship I have with my mother to something even better than it was before she got sick, and her health has even improved since that time of our lives. However, beyond that, I came to experience a level of mercy from God that not many people necessarily experience on the worst day of my life. That is what I would call “severe mercy,” the sort of mercy designed to shatter one’s harmful reality that they have built up for themselves so that they have no choice but to come back to repentance. Had that situation been allowed to continue like it had been, I don’t know where I would be today, but it wouldn’t be here, writing this IBS. God allowed us both to fall hard into the worst sort of sorrow and despair so that we would both turn back to Him out of a desperation that neither of us had had before that day. He let us shoot each other with proverbial arrows, as it were, so that we would seek forgiveness and aid for sins that were already killing us both. That is severe mercy. It is mercy that breaks, but never fully annihilates a person.

This is an important observation for any believer to make. God can and will break those whom He loves. He may have to destroy everything about their world, but it is only so that they can return to the glory and grace that exists in His world.

Personally, this is something that I believe all believers ought to be praying about as they attempt to walk in the light with Christ. When new and old sins are revealed to us, we all ought to be willing to let God break us so that we can be free of those sins. The breaking hurts, but it’s the only way to grow in our love and faith in Him. My application will be to thank Him for the breaking that He has already done in my life so far, and ask that He would reveal more sins to me that I need to let Him purge me of and let Him break me to be free of them. I will do this today and at least once tomorrow and the next day as well.